Supply and Demand of Time

200 years ago, people had to hand wash their clothes. I've never done it, but I'm assuming a normal washing-machine-size load would've taken at least an hour or two to wash. With a couple loads to wash, washing your clothes could've been an all day task. It would seem that now that we have washers, we should have so much more free time. This same principle is true in other areas of life as well. Before computers, you had to hand write any essay or letter that you needed to write. Now I can type up a 10000 word dissertation with proper spelling, punctuation, and grammar in a matter of a few minutes. Before the Internet, research included making your way to local library, searching the shelves for books that might have the information that you needed, and then reading through all these books to find that information. It is pretty evident that because we have more time available to us, we value it less - exactly like the economics principle of supply and demand. If we had all of our current daily duties, but we also had to spend a couple hours washing our clothes by hand each week, we would value our time more, and spend less of it doing things that are of little worth, such as aimlessly surfing the Internet.